MOLECULAR CHANGES OCCURRING DURING FULL GAS OIL HYDROPROCESSING SCREENED BY INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY.

摘要

The purpose of hydroprocessing in the petroleum industry is to convert heavy oil, heavy distillates and/or residues into more valuable materials such as naphtha, gasoline, jet fuel and diesel fuel. This process consists in the catalytic hydrogenation together with thermal cracking in order to redistribute the hydrocarbons toward to light distillation cuts.Both processes in series, allow upgrading more efficiently the feed, increasing the hydrogen to carbon ratio and reducing the formation of coke. In general terms, this process converts high molecular weight compounds into lower molecular weight compounds at the same time that certain contaminants such as sulfur and nitrogen are removed. These molecular changes may be followed by infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Nevertheless, quantitative analysis using FTIR presents difficulties using classical univariate statistical methods because many functional groups, whose signals are spread along the IR spectrum, are involved in the reactions. Chemometric methods extract valuable information from spectral data arrays.